Help me choose a HDD!

osaddictosaddict London, UK
edited November 2006 in Hardware
Right, after reading quite a lot and taking on board opinions of many people- I am utterly confused as to what I should do.

I require a new SATA HDD which will be used in a multimedia enclosure. (The Sumvision Aqua)

I am looking to 250-320gb ish in size.

I did some research and had narrowed it down to the samsung spinpoint 250gb or the Western Digital Caviar SE 250gb.

However, a friend claimed both were rubbish and had poor reputations, and that I should go for a maxtor or seagate.

Price seems to be pretty much irrelivent- theres only a few pounds in it either way.......

My main desire is for a very reliable drive- its only going to be loading mp3's jpg's and divx files- so it doesnt need to be particularly special- just a workhorse that will go on and on!

A bonus feature would be a quiet drive- as the enclosure will be in my bedroom, however, as I understand- the difference between the most silent and the noisiest may not be a huge concern- expecially when inside a caddy and about 10ft away from my ears!

Comments

  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    Okay, well, of the four brands you listed, only Seagate and Western Digital are considered reliable. Frankly, your friend was wrong. The Caviar series from WD is very quiet, and very fast, but it comes down to price for HDDs in my opinion.
  • osaddictosaddict London, UK
    edited November 2006
    I had heard Samsung had a very poor reputation in the past, and their reliability was 'better' but that instantly made alarm bells ring...

    Price really does not seem to come in to it for me... (taking the example of 1 place- ill avoid names so it doesnt look like I favour 1 shop over another!)


    Samsung SpinPoint P120S 250GB SATA2 8MB 7200RPM (£50) (Hence 20p per gb)


    Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM
    (£65) (Hence 20p per gb)


    Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM
    (£50) (Hence 20p per gb)

    A place which sells the 250gb Seagate has it for £53, so £3 more- not much odds

    Interestingly enough- the 1 comment about the seagate 320 on the site i nabbed those prices from:
    'I ordered this drive expecting it to live up to Seagate's reputation of making silent hard drives. However, this one is very very noisy - there is a very hard griding noise when it is reading or writing. So much so that it rattles away inside my Antec Sonata II silent case. It does sound like the whole case is vibrating. Apparantly the reason why this drive is so noisy is that Seagate have had to disable their acoustic management technology found in most of their other drives in the 7200.10 series because of a patent legal issue. This drive is a big dissapointment from Seagate. I'm going to order a Samsung Spinpoint next time as my old one is silent and the new Sata2 ones have the same acoustic management system so they should be silent too.'

    But thats just 1 dude, and I havnt researched the drive that much myself yet...

    Also- where exactally does Hitachi fit in to the equation? (Previously IBM drives, I know, but how are they placed in the scheme of things?)
  • osaddictosaddict London, UK
    edited November 2006
    Well, a slight modification is needed in my choices..

    'Supported hard drive format: Standard parallel-ATA 3.5"'

    Meaning I have to opt for ide rather than sata drives...

    That being said- regardless of what everyone has said about other brands- everyone seems to rate Seagate in some form or another...

    So I am thinking this
    http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/marketing/detail/0,1081,754,00.html

    Should be a safe and reliable bet?
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